Mario Bolduc Books in Order

Mario Bolduc was born in Beauceville, Quebec, in 1953. Before turning to crime fiction, he built a long career in Quebec film and television, working as a screenwriter, director, producer, and editor. That practical, visual background shows up in his novels, which move through cities, borders, and tense encounters with a camera-ready sense of place.

Film came first.

Bolduc wrote, directed, produced, and edited early projects including Un grand logement and Le Shift de nuit. He later directed L'Oreille d'un sourd and worked as a screenwriter on Le Dernier Tunnel and La Maison du pêcheur. In 1993, his short film Repas compris received the Prix Normande-Juneau, a Quebec film critics' award for short films.

He also spent time helping train and support other screen storytellers. Bolduc served on the educational board of the Institut national de l'image et du son from 2000 to 2002 and was vice-president of the Société des auteurs de radio, télévision et cinéma. It is a career built around the mechanics of a story, how scenes connect, what people hide, and when to cut away.

His fiction took that experience in a new direction. The Kashmir Trap, first published in French in 2005, introduced Max O’Brien, a professional con man with a messy past and a stubborn loyalty to the people he cares about. The book sends Max to India after a family murder, mixing a personal investigation with the pressure of the Kashmir conflict.

Max is not a tidy hero.

Bolduc continued the series with The Roma Plot, which brings Max to Bucharest when a friend is accused of a mass killing. The story connects a present-day mystery to the persecution of Roma people during the Second World War. Its original French edition, Tsiganes, won the Arthur Ellis Award for best French-language crime novel published in Canada in 2008.

In The Tanzania Conspiracy, Max investigates the deaths of a former lover and her daughter in Tanzania. The case draws him into the danger faced by people with albinism and the criminal networks that prey on them. Across the three books, Bolduc uses international settings not as travel-window dressing, but as places shaped by history, politics, inequality, and people trying to get through a bad situation alive.

His plots often pair a fast-moving investigation with a larger human question. What does loyalty cost? How much can the past control the present? And can a man who lives by deception still do the right thing when it counts?

Bolduc’s novels were originally written in French and later translated into English. He has lived in Montreal, Quebec, and has also written beyond the Max O’Brien books, including a biography of singer Nanette Workman. His later French-language crime novel La nuit des albinos received another Arthur Ellis Award in 2013.

For readers, the draw is clear. These are globe-spanning mysteries with a con man at the center, grounded in real social and historical pressures rather than easy answers.